


A Mini History Lesson (3)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [21]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Constitutional law, Fix-It, Gen, Historical, Law, People are not devices, Psi Corps, Telepath Law (Babylon 5), The Corps Was Right, The Psi Corps tag is mine, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-10-11 14:43:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10467444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Part 3 of the "mini history lesson" series.Why are we studying Constitutional Law? Because these are the legal underpinnings that allow normals to murder telepaths - and get away with it.This is also an in-depth look at how constitutional interpretations that were adopted in the 20th century to protect the "little guy" from abuse of government power themselves became vehicles for exactly that, in the "bizarro world" of Earth Alliance law.Part 1 ishere.Part 2 ishere.





	

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> Big Picture: In _Katz_ , the US Supreme Court majority opinion adopts Justice Brandeis' rationale in _Olmstead_ , establishing a brand new "right to privacy" and expanding the meaning of "unreasonable searches and seizures" covered in the 4th Amendment from application only to physical, tangible persons and things (as the Framers intended) to intangibles, such as spoken words (and eventually, thoughts, feelings, memories, etc.).
> 
> As Justice Black states in his dissent:
> 
> ""The Court talks about a constitutional 'right of privacy' as though there is some constitutional provision or provisions forbidding any law ever to be passed which might abridge the 'privacy' of individuals. But there is not."
> 
> "I made clear in that dissent my fear of the dangers involved when this Court uses the "broad, abstract and ambiguous concept" of "privacy" as a "comprehensive substitute for the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against _unreasonable searches and seizures_.
> 
> "The Fourth Amendment protects privacy only to the extent that it prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures of "persons, houses, papers, and effects." No general right is created by the Amendment so as to give this Court the unlimited power to hold unconstitutional everything which affects privacy. Certainly the Framers, well acquainted as they were with the excesses of governmental power, did not intend to grant this Court such omnipotent lawmaking authority as that. The history of governments proves that it is dangerous to freedom to repose such powers in courts."
> 
> With this bold step away from the original meaning of the Constitution and the adoption of a broad "right to privacy" as the law of the land, mechanisms were thus established that eventually led to the erasure of constitutional rights of telepaths (in the name of protecting the "privacy" of normals), and the creation of a permanently subordinate legal and social class.
> 
> This is how, as Garibaldi put it, normals "took away every right they had."
> 
> Dangerous to freedom, indeed.

_The case excerpted below, Katz v. United States, overrules Olmstead and adopts Justice Brandeis’ interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. Although it does not directly mention telepaths, it is still important. Under Katz, an “unreasonable search and seizure” no longer remains limited to physical, tangible things; the Fourth Amendment has now been extended and reinterpreted to include the intangible, such as spoken words, so long as the utterances occur with a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”_

_As normals constitute the vast majority of our population (as well as the entirety of the Senate and judicial system), their definitions of “reasonable” are controlling, and shall remain so. However, consider the matter from a telepath’s point of view, to whom others’ thoughts and feelings are plainly visible, even ambient, as are sounds and smells and the temperature of a room. Are normals’ expectations of privacy always “reasonable”?_

_And can thoughts, feelings and memories be "seized" in the first place?_

_Are the thoughts of normals more like a “private” conversation held in an old-fashioned phone booth, or more like a conversation held out in a field? (To a normal? To a telepath?) Is telepathy like “wire-tapping,” as the law assumes, or perhaps instead like seeing what’s written on a paper shoved under one’s nose?_

_How does Earth Alliance law codify and enshrine its point of view? And who benefits from the codification of that point of view?_

*****

Katz v. United States, 389 US 347 (1967)

1\. JUSTICE STEWART delivered the opinion of the Court.

The petitioner was convicted in the District Court for the Southern District of California under an eight-count indictment charging him with transmitting wagering information by telephone from Los Angeles to Miami and Boston, in violation of a federal statute. At trial, the Government was permitted, over the petitioner's objection, to introduce evidence of the petitioner's end of telephone conversations, overheard by FBI agents who had attached an electronic listening and recording device to the outside of the public telephone booth from which he had placed his calls.

…

The Government contends … that the activities of its agents in this case should not be tested by Fourth Amendment requirements, for the surveillance technique they employed involved no physical penetration of the telephone booth from which the petitioner placed his calls. It is true that the absence of such penetration was at one time thought to foreclose further Fourth Amendment inquiry … for that Amendment was thought to limit only searches and seizures of tangible property. But "[t]he premise that property interests control the right of the Government to search and seize has been discredited." _Warden v. Hayden_. Thus, although a closely divided Court supposed in _Olmstead_ that surveillance without any trespass and without the seizure of any material object fell outside the ambit of the Constitution, we have since departed from the narrow view on which that decision rested. Indeed, we have expressly held that the Fourth Amendment governs not only the seizure of tangible items, but extends as well to the recording of oral statements, overheard without any "technical trespass under . . . local property law." Once this much is acknowledged, and once it is recognized that the Fourth Amendment protects people -- and not simply "areas" -- against unreasonable searches and seizures, it becomes clear that the reach of that Amendment cannot turn upon the presence or absence of a physical intrusion into any given enclosure.

We conclude that the underpinnings of _Olmstead_ and _Goldman_ have been so eroded by our subsequent decisions that the "trespass" doctrine there enunciated can no longer be regarded as controlling. The Government's activities in electronically listening to and recording the petitioner's words violated the privacy upon which he justifiably relied while using the telephone booth, and thus constituted a "search and seizure" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The fact that the electronic device employed to achieve that end did not happen to penetrate the wall of the booth can have no constitutional significance.

1\. JUSTICE HARLAN, concurring.

I join the opinion of the Court, which I read to hold only (a) that an enclosed telephone booth is an area where, like a home, and unlike a field, a person has a constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy; (b) that electronic, as well as physical, intrusion into a place that is in this sense private may constitute a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and (c) that the invasion of a constitutionally protected area by federal authorities is, as the Court has long held, presumptively unreasonable in the absence of a search warrant.

As the Court's opinion states, "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places." The question, however, is what protection it affords to those people. Generally, as here, the answer to that question requires reference to a "place." My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Thus, a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected," because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited. On the other hand, conversations in the open would not be protected against being overheard, for the expectation of privacy under the circumstances would be unreasonable.

The critical fact in this case is that "[o]ne who occupies it, [a telephone booth] shuts the door behind him, and pays the toll that permits him to place a call is surely entitled to assume" that his conversation is not being intercepted. The point is not that the booth is "accessible to the public" at other times, but that it is a temporarily private place whose momentary occupants' expectations of freedom from intrusion are recognized as reasonable.

1\. JUSTICE BLACK, dissenting.

If I could agree with the Court that eavesdropping carried on by electronic means (equivalent to wiretapping) constitutes a "search" or "seizure," I would be happy to join the Court's opinion. … Notwithstanding these good efforts of the Court, I am still unable to agree with its interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.

My basic objection is two-fold: (1) I do not believe that the words of the Amendment will bear the meaning given them by today's decision, and (2) I do not believe that it is the proper role of this Court to rewrite the Amendment in order "to bring it into harmony with the times," and thus reach a result that many people believe to be desirable.

While I realize that an argument based on the meaning of words lacks the scope, and no doubt the appeal, of broad policy discussions and philosophical discourses on such nebulous subjects as privacy, for me, the language of the Amendment is the crucial place to look in construing a written document such as our Constitution. The Fourth Amendment says that

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized."

The first clause protects "persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. . . ." These words connote the idea of tangible things with size, form, and weight, things capable of being searched, seized, or both. … A conversation overheard by eavesdropping, whether by plain snooping or wiretapping, is not tangible and, under the normally accepted meanings of the words, can neither be searched nor seized. … Rather than using language in a completely artificial way, I must conclude that the Fourth Amendment simply does not apply to eavesdropping.

Tapping telephone wires, of course, was an unknown possibility at the time the Fourth Amendment was adopted. But eavesdropping (and wiretapping is nothing more than eavesdropping by telephone) was, as even the majority opinion in _Berger, supra,_ recognized,

"an ancient practice which, at common law, was condemned as a nuisance. In those days, the eavesdropper listened by naked ear under the eaves of houses or their windows, or beyond their walls seeking out private discourse."

There can be no doubt that the Framers were aware of this practice, and, if they had desired to outlaw or restrict the use of evidence obtained by eavesdropping, I believe that they would have used the appropriate language to do so in the Fourth Amendment. They certainly would not have left such a task to the ingenuity of language-stretching judges. No one, it seems to me, can read the debates on the Bill of Rights without reaching the conclusion that its Framers and critics well knew the meaning of the words they used, what they would be understood to mean by others, their scope and their limitations. Under these circumstances, it strikes me as a charge against their scholarship, their common sense and their candor to give to the Fourth Amendment's language the eavesdropping meaning the Court imputes to it today.

I do not deny that common sense requires, and that this Court often has said, that the Bill of Rights' safeguards should be given a liberal construction. This principle, however, does not justify construing the search and seizure amendment as applying to eavesdropping or the "seizure" of conversations. The Fourth Amendment was aimed directly at the abhorred practice of breaking in, ransacking and searching homes and other buildings and seizing people's personal belongings without warrants issued by magistrates. The Amendment deserves, and this Court has given it, a liberal construction in order to protect against warrantless searches of buildings and seizures of tangible personal effects. But, until today, this Court has refused to say that eavesdropping comes within the ambit of Fourth Amendment restrictions.

So far, I have attempted to state why I think the words of the Fourth Amendment prevent its application to eavesdropping. It is important now to show that this has been the traditional view of the Amendment's scope since its adoption, and that the Court's decision in this case, along with its amorphous holding in _Berger_ last Term, marks the first real departure from that view.

The first case to reach this Court which actually involved a clear-cut test of the Fourth Amendment's applicability to eavesdropping through a wiretap was, of course, _Olmstead, supra._ In holding that the interception of private telephone conversations by means of wiretapping was not a violation of the Fourth Amendment, this Court, speaking through Mr. Chief Justice Taft, examined the language of the Amendment and found, just as I do now, that the words could not be stretched to encompass overheard conversations:

…

"Justice Bradley in the _Boyd_ case, and Justice Clark[e] in the _Gouled_ case, said that the Fifth Amendment and the Fourth Amendment were to be liberally construed to effect the purpose of the framers of the Constitution in the interest of liberty. But that cannot justify enlargement of the language employed beyond the possible practical meaning of houses, persons, papers, and effects, or so to apply the words search and seizure as to forbid hearing or sight."

…

It should be noted that the Court in _Olmstead_ based its decision squarely on the fact that wiretapping or eavesdropping does not violate the Fourth Amendment. As shown _supra_ in the cited quotation from the case, the Court went to great pains to examine the actual language of the Amendment, and found that the words used simply could not be stretched to cover eavesdropping. That there was no trespass was not the determinative factor, and indeed the Court, in citing _Hester v. United States,_ indicated that, even where there was a trespass, the Fourth Amendment does not automatically apply to evidence obtained by "hearing or sight." The _Olmstead_ majority characterized _Hester_ as holding

"that the testimony of two officers of the law who trespassed on the defendant's land, concealed themselves one hundred yards away from his house, and saw him come out and hand a bottle of whiskey to another, was not inadmissible. While there was a trespass, there was no search of person, house, papers or effects."

Thus, the clear holding of the _Olmstead_ and _Goldman_ cases, undiluted by any question of trespass, is that eavesdropping, in both its original and modern forms, is not violative of the Fourth Amendment.

…

Thus, I think that, although the Court attempts to convey the impression that, for some reason, today _Olmstead_ and _Goldman_ are no longer good law, it must face up to the fact that these cases have never been overruled, or even "eroded." It is the Court's opinions in this case and _Berger_ which, for the first time since 1791, when the Fourth Amendment was adopted, have declared that eavesdropping is subject to Fourth Amendment restrictions and that conversations can be "seized."[*] I must align myself with all those judges who up to this year have never been able to impute such a meaning to the words of the Amendment.

Since I see no way in which the words of the Fourth Amendment can be construed to apply to eavesdropping, that closes the matter for me. In interpreting the Bill of Rights, I willingly go as far as a liberal construction of the language takes me, but I simply cannot in good conscience give a meaning to words which they have never before been thought to have and which they certainly do not have in common ordinary usage. I will not distort the words of the Amendment in order to "keep the Constitution up to date" or "to bring it into harmony with the times." It was never meant that this Court have such power, which, in effect, would make us a continuously functioning constitutional convention.

With this decision the Court has completed, I hope, its rewriting of the Fourth Amendment, which started only recently when the Court began referring incessantly to the Fourth Amendment not so much as a law against _unreasonable_ searches and seizures as one to protect an individual's privacy. By clever word juggling, the Court finds it plausible to argue that language aimed specifically at searches and seizures of things that can be searched and seized may, to protect privacy, be applied to eavesdropped evidence of conversations that can neither be searched nor seized. Few things happen to an individual that do not affect his privacy in one way or another. Thus, by arbitrarily substituting the Court's language, designed to protect privacy, for the Constitution's language, designed to protect against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Court has made the Fourth Amendment its vehicle for holding all laws violative of the Constitution which offend the Court's broadest concept of privacy. As I said in _Griswold v. Connecticut_ ,

"The Court talks about a constitutional 'right of privacy' as though there is some constitutional provision or provisions forbidding any law ever to be passed which might abridge the 'privacy' of individuals. But there is not."

I made clear in that dissent my fear of the dangers involved when this Court uses the "broad, abstract and ambiguous concept" of "privacy" as a "comprehensive substitute for the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against _unreasonable searches and seizures.'"_

The Fourth Amendment protects privacy only to the extent that it prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures of "persons, houses, papers, and effects." No general right is created by the Amendment so as to give this Court the unlimited power to hold unconstitutional everything which affects privacy. Certainly the Framers, well acquainted as they were with the excesses of governmental power, did not intend to grant this Court such omnipotent lawmaking authority as that. The history of governments proves that it is dangerous to freedom to repose such powers in courts.

For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.

*****

_The Court was not, however, finished in its rewriting of the Fourth (and Fifth) Amendments. Rather, in the years following Katz, the newly minted “right to privacy,” created from Justice Brandeis’ “penumbras” of the Fourth Amendment, only expanded in scope, quickly forming the basis for policy even in seemingly unrelated areas such as abortion (Roe v. Wade (1973)). The horse was out of the barn._

_As relevant to telepath law, the “right to privacy” ballooned again in the early 2100s, during the “telepath scare.” Cases affirmed the constitutionality of the Crawford-Tokash Act requiring telepath registration, and granted normals the right to be free from the presence of “unmarked” telepaths in all public places, and hence from real and potential violations of their privacy. New torts were created to punish those (typically businesses) who had willfully or negligently exposed others to the presence of unmarked telepaths._

_Subsequent cases also affirmed the prohibition of telepaths from certain professions, and the right of normals to discriminate in others, as in housing and some public accommodations. In these cases as in others, telepaths' rights to equal protection under the law were abolished in the name of protecting the privacy of normals with whom they might interact._


End file.
